Towards the transversal detection of DDoS network attacks in 5G multi-tenant overlay networks

•Support for intrusion detection system in the edge of the 5G multi-tenant network.•DDoS detection of simultaneous attacks against infrastructure, tenant and 5G user.•Prototype and empirical validation using realistic attacks in 5G networks.•Satisfactory performance and scalability results for the novel functionalities. Currently, there is no any effective security solution which can detect cyber-attacks against 5G networks where multitenancy and user mobility are some unique characteristics that impose significant challenges over such security solutions. This paper focuses on addressing a transversal detection system to be able to protect at the same time, infrastructures, tenants and 5G users in both edge and core network segments of the 5G multi-tenant infrastructures. A novel approach which significantly extends the capabilities of a commonly used IDS, to accurately identify attacking nodes in a 5G network, regardless of multiple network traffic encapsulations, has been proposed in this paper. The proposed approach is suitable to be deployed in almost all 5G network segments including the Mobile Edge Computing. Both architectural design and data models are described in this contribution. Empirical experiments have been carried out a realistic 5G multi-tenant infrastructures to intensively validate the design of the proposed approach regarding scalability and flexibility.